Artist William A. Newman

Where Technique Meets Technology

- Stacey Schmidt

William Newman is, above all, a painter. Reading his press clippings, one would learn more: that he is an art professor, a creator of controversial public murals, and a computer artist. But to Newman, these facts are immaterial compared with his devotion to painting, his love of color, and his fascination with the technical processes that have informed his paintings on canvas. Over the course of a career that has entered its fourth decade, Newman’s work has become intimately tied to the city of Washington — both contributing to, and influenced by, the social and political fabric of the nation’s capital.

Newman has frequently created art that stands in opposition to the fickle trends of the American cultural scene while still reflecting something of the time and place in which it was made. During the 1970s, when the art world had become almost militaristic in its march toward pluralism, Newman rather famously created Lady Sarah, a 1975 construction-wall interpretation of the traditional female nude, or odalisque, that, along with some related works, ran smack into the women’s liberation movement. In 1976 Robert Motherwell sent a letter to the New York Times claiming that “Painting has reached a point where youngsters can only add a footnote.” Newman, however, continued to experiment in his studio with the classic technique of laying glazes of transparent color over imprimatura (monochromatic underpaintings), a laborious process used most notably by Johannes Vermeer. Newman apparently had not gotten the word that painting was dead.

Newman was still painting in earnest as the 1980s rolled around. The eighties saw an explosion of the masses—mass media, mass culture, and mass consumption. This was the decade of MTV, “greed is good,” and a hundred and one cable stations streaming into American televisions. And the art world was keeping pace, with its “go-go market” inflated by speculative buying. Much of the art being produced in the eighties was either drawn from the culture of consumerism or critiquing it, and a certain level of ironic detachment seemed de rigueur for critical success. Yet most of Newman’s works during the eighties were intensely personal reflections on the complexities of relationships, often stunningly lacking in ironic detachment. Paintings such as Is Something Bothering You, 1985, or the atmospheric mixed-media works Her, 1985, and What Ya Thinking–Mitsubishi Electric, from the same year, leave one feeling like a voyeur witnessing a personal moment, an uninvited guest intruding on a private encounter.

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